Fediverse

Lemmy devs were quite receptive and helpful to the hexbear developers that contributed.

For what it is worth as a multi-year instance with over 500 users for the majority of that time we were able to handle moderating and administrating the instance with the tools available and with support from the developers.

Hexbear faced everything the new instances had before there were any lemmy back-channels to help communicate, coordinate, or develop tooling.

Managing a lemmy instance takes a lot of effort and help and if many lemmy admins weren't afraid of hexbear and actually asked for specific help in how to run a community I'm sure hexbear admins could help. (Those that haven't blocked me, at least)

I find it ironic that lemmy.world would not have grown as much as it had if the lemmy devs hadn't helped it by promoting it as "the generic instance" similar aid was given to beehaw, yet the known liar Rookie is here and in similar posts popping off. The same Rookie that wrote a lemmy bot that scraped every comment/post on .world and reposted it into Discord.

Gabe said it himself, when you have sufficient and active moderators a lemmy community essentially runs itself. I have organized almost 10 local moderator drives, vetted and educated interested users and provided frequent check-ins while removing moderators no longer interested/active I can agree with what Gabe said regarding community moderation.

For a site-level I can agree that not having a site-mod is annoying however it is a matter of organization to set up a pipeline for trusted multi-community moderators to become admins thus giving you the opportunity to recruit from a diverse set of time-zones so that you can deal with wreckers.

If an instance admin doesn't want that level of responsibility, allow-list federation exists and works quite well.

To say there are features missing is true, however as someone that has been a lemmy admin for almost 4 years it is my perspective that it is possible to create a flourishing lemmy instance with the available tooling, that support does exist, and that developer contributions are valued. Multiple features developed on the Hexbear fork were integrated into upstream lemmy.

Thank you @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

I just want to add a counter-point to the argument that Lemmy devs are somehow opposed to contributions. In my experience, there has been no resistance to contributing any type of change (I have personally added niche features for running Lemmy in a distributed manner, optimizations, bug fixes, etc). In fact I would claim the complete opposite - I have received plenty of support and good code reviews from maintainers whenever I have wanted to contribute anything.

I think there is truth to the claim that Lemmy maintainers don’t have a lot of patience for people making demands and snarky comments, but that is very different from being opposed to contributions. Also, after running a big instance for a while now, I completely understand this lack of patience - when some of your users just keep being rude to you, it wears down your patience. It’s easy to patiently and kindly respond to the first 100 rude users, but at some point after that, it just becomes gradually more mentally exhausting, to the point where it’s basically impossible.

Even the example provided in the blog post: I don’t think snowe had bad intentions, but I do think they had clearly misinterpreted the situation with that issue, and their comments were needlessly condescending.

Gabe, a couple of weeks ago, nutomic was asking for ideas on a name for his federated wiki alternative project, I put forth my suggestion that I thought was better (also because I didn't want it to be named after the bin chicken), but he told me, pretty bluntly in fact, that he is sticking with his original choice.

Am I bummed about it? Of course.

But it would be silly of me if I kept pestering him because he didn't do exactly what I want, because at the end of the day, he doesn't owe me anything.

I can make suggestions to him, but he doesn't have to take them, I'm not his manager, and I can take no as an answer. (He could have let me down a little easier though.)

From reading your blog post, I get the impression that you are venting because 1. the Lemmy devs didn't prioritize on the "improved moderation tools" that you wanted and 2. you are unhappy with the way they are running their own instance, which is kind of the point of decentralization that instances are ran independently from development.

Let me ask you a follow-up question to think about (you don't have to answer me): You are putting weight into Sublinks right now, what's to say that you wouldn't have any disagreement with jgrim about the development priorities of Sublinks?

Lastly, sorry I never did the thing that I promised you to do a few months about moderating a comm on lit cafe, been kind of stressed and irritable recently and can't really find the energy to do much creative writing. Sorry.

From the blog

Something that I notice said consistently by those who have little experience in Lemmy admin spaces is “why not just contribute then?”

And the answer people try. And this happens. This unfortunately leads into the next point that is the developer teams behavior. As well, highlighted above in the blog post of that Lemmy user who unfortunately had to deal with devs behavior themselves.

From https://programming.dev/post/5180682

I will no longer be able to assist with development nor debugging actual issues with the software… Quite juvenile behavior from the devs. It stemmed from this issue where the devs continuously argued in public by opening and closing an issue. Anyway, thought I would keep y’all apprised of the situation, since these are the people maintaining the software you are currently using.

Root issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/234

1st snowe's comment

This is a really weird thing to have an argument about. Scheduling client side would be a nightmare, like how Microsoft Outlook handles emails where you schedule an email for the morning, close your laptop, and then the email doesn't send because your laptop is asleep.

But even then arguing about it through reopening and closing an issue is really weird. Leave the issue open, have a discussion, talk about the pros and cons of putting it in the software, and then make a decision with the community.

2nd snowe's comment

And then marking the most relevant comment in the thread as off-topic. You're really alienating your users and server admins with this. Have the discussion like adults.

Full of . There's hardly any arguing if you look at the timeline of the 2 devs's comments. 7 days temp ban to chill looks ok to me.

There is a lot of misleading information in this post.

Something that I notice said consistently by those who have little experience in Lemmy admin spaces is “why not just contribute then?”And the answer people try. And this happens. This unfortunately leads into the next point that is the developer teams behavior.

Dessalines and I had some discussion whether the linked issue should be closed or not. Anyway we decided to leave it open in the end. Then some weeks later a user came along and made a completely offtopic complaint that this decision making process is somehow wrong. I admit that I overreacted by giving a temporary ban for this, but mistakes happen and its completely disingenious to spin this as some sort of general toxic behaviour from our side.

There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.

This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.

Another aspect of this is that the Lemmy devs run two instances: lemmy.ml & lemmygrad.ml

What makes you believe this? I can only speak for myself, and I am not involved with lemmygrad in any way.

The biggest piece that broke all confidence in the Lemmy developers amongst many admins including myself is that during the CSAM spam attacks there was complete radio silence. The developers made no statement on the matter. And when Github requests were made to try and propose ideas about how to fix what happened, the developers explicitly stated they didn’t have time to focus on that. No dialogue.

Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.

As well, when a post was made about Sublinks (A project I will touch a bit more on, and am involved in due to the reasons I have highlighted above) the comments that were made by Lemmy’s lead developers were extremely petty. This lessens peoples confidence in your project, not improves it.

Why do you consider it petty? Its a fact that jgrim never opened any issue for the features he wanted, not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request. Its also true that it took multiple years of fulltime work to get Lemmy ready for production, and I dont see how Sublinks can be any faster when it has only volunteer contributors. That doesnt mean I wish for Sublinks to fail, in fact I hope it will be successful so that admins and users have more choices available, and to improve resilience through independent codebases and development teams.

Generally you seem to have an extremely entitled attitude. Lemmy is an open source project that is provided for free. I would also love to fix all the problems that users report, and implement all those features. But unlike Reddit we are not a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. We are just two individuals funded by donations and working from our homes. There is only a limited number of hours in each day and only so much work we can finish in that time. If you are unhappy with Lemmy then by all means switch to a different platform, because we dont get any direct benefit from having more users.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

I am one of the Beehaw admins.

I, personally, have not had negative experiences with you or anyone else associated with the Lemmy software platform.

I appreciate that everyone here, in this thread, has been able to vocalize their praises and constructive criticisms.

I believe that it is very important, for the further development of the fediverse, to keep these conversations open to everyone involved.

Please, let us all reflect on the reasons that we are invested in the fediverse.

Personally, I believe that the fediverse has an enormous potential to replace all of the corporate-run social media platforms.

I am invested in Beehaw and the fediverse for the sake of the people.

Your frustration is palpable and that's disappointing. Lemmy has improved a lot since we all arrived while the software experience is a lot smoother, admins have been clamouring for moderation tools the whole time. Ultimately there needs to be more contribution to do everything that everyone wants, but moderation needs to be a higher priority for sure.

I will say this though. I know you dislike developers discussing, disagreeing or even arguing, but I actually think it's nice to see things in the open.

Whether you find happiness here or elsewhere in the fediverse, I wish you the best of success and not just because you host one of my communities 😂